Behold: The new Dave Thomas Circle is done, and it's glorious
The infamous Northeast intersection, known best for a Wendy's and epic traffic jams, has been reconfigured and spruced up.
Pierre L’Enfant may have laid down the diagonal state-named avenues D.C. is famous for, but Muriel Bowser could well enter the history books as the leader who finally tamed one of those avenues’ most chaotic intersections.
Yes, we’re talking of the infamous point where New York Avenue, Florida Avenue, and First Street meet in Northeast, a tangled and traffic-inducing intersection long known as Dave Thomas Circle – after the Wendy’s restaurant that for years awkwardly occupied a triangular-shaped plot of land smack in the middle.
It was just over four years ago that D.C. paid $13 million to buy the Wendy’s, less as a municipal investment in Frostys For All and more to demolish it as part of a broader revamp of the intersection. Once the cruel deed was done, D.C. got to work on the $40 million project, which is set to be completed in June – and with a new Mamie “Peanut” Johnson Plaza where the Wendy’s once stood.
Two-way traffic has been restored on First Street NE and Florida Avenue; no more of the awkward circuitous trip around a mediocre fast food island to go, well, straight. (There are also two turn lanes from Florida onto New York Avenue.) There are even new bike lanes, and the new plaza features green space and long stretches of public seating arcing along two internal walkways. There’s also expanded public space along the front of the ATF building on the southern side of the intersection (with a small play structure for kids), and another public area on the northwestern end.
I recently visited the intersection, and it seems downright tame compared to what it once was. But I do question whether anyone will actually sit in or use the new public spaces, especially the plaza that replaced the Wendy’s. Lovely as it looks, it’s still sandwiched between lanes of impatient drivers, and there’s lots of them – a 2017 traffic count conducted by D.C. found upwards of 90,000 cars traveling through the tangled intersection every single weekday. A Zen garden it is not.
Soon enough, even memories of that old Wendy’s will fade, and this will just become another traffic-choked D.C. intersection. But Dave Thomas’s spirit lives on. As I was waiting in the lobby of a nearby residential building to take a picture of the new intersection, a delivery driver walked in. In his hand was a lunch someone ordered – from a Wendy’s somewhere else.
